According to a recent study, our impact has been so extreme
that it makes the appearance of oxygen — an event that geologists
call the Great Oxidation — look trivial.

Scientists call
our geologic epoch the Anthropocene — it began around
the time we detonated the first atomic bomb and coated the planet
with radioactive particles.

"If the Great Oxidation ... was a 'punctuation event' in Earth's
history, the rapid and extensive geological impact of the
Anthropocene is an exclamation mark," Robert Hazen, a
mineralogist and astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution for
Science's Geophysical Laboratory, told Business Insider.

While there is plenty of evidence of humans' impact on the planet
that we can easily observe — the construction of cities, a
changing global climate, the extinction of other species — one of
the most dramatic effects is invisible to most people.

These materials will be visible for millions or even billions of
years and will "mark our age as different from all that came
before," said Edward Grew, a professor of earth and climate
sciences at the University of Maine and one of Hazen's
co-authors.

Human activities are responsible for at least 208 brand-new
minerals. Many of those have formed along the walls of
mines, where cool, moist air reacts with sooty particles of iron
ore.

"When one looks at a mine, it’s really a disturbance of the
Earth’s surface," Grew said.

In a mine, dozens of activities can give rise to new minerals —
including the dumping of large amounts of iron or copper ore, the
build-up of water along mine tunnel walls, and even fires inside
mines.

The glowing, sea-colored
mineral simonkolleite shown below was found on an copper mining
tool at the Rowley Mine in Maricopa County,
Arizona.RRUFF

Some of the new minerals that have resulted from human
activity are eye-catchingly beautiful. On a copper mining tool at
the Rowley Mine in Maricopa County, Arizona, Hazen and his
colleagues found a glowing, sea-colored mineral called
simonkolleite.

"You’re just stirring a pot in a way, exposing ores to a
different environment and getting these new minerals to form,"
Grew said.

In addition to creating new minerals, humans are also moving
around existing ones and shifting how they are distributed
globally.

Minerals like abhurite, which are essentially the result of
corrosion that happens after a shipwreck or another human-made
disaster, can be found across the planet. Hazen and his
colleagues found a piece of abhurite from the wreckage of the SS
Cheerful, which sunk in 1885 near Cornwall, England.

Abhurite from the wreckage of the SS
Cheerful.RRUFF

"What we're seeing...these are things that’ll persist in the
geologic record that a million years from now people will find,"
said Hazen. "It's this incredibly rapid pulse caused by human
activity."

Hazen's log, while extensive, still doesn't cover all of the
mineral-like materials that humans have created. These additional
materials include magnets, alloys, and building materials like
bricks and concrete. Hazen estimates that there are hundreds or
even thousands more of these materials that researchers have yet
to officially classify.

"We're talking about a pervasive layer of Earth's surface which
humans have changed in fundamental ways," said Hazen.